Hugh Dillon walks line between music and acting

Photograph by: Carole Segal/AMC
, Postmedia News

“Carefully.”

That’s how Hugh Dillon insists he chooses his TV and film roles. The career actor and former lead singer of the punk rock band The Headstones has pulled off a rare double in recent weeks, shuffling back and forth between recurring roles in writer Simon Barry’s high-energy, Vancouver-set sci-fi thriller Continuum and the dark, controversial, critically divisive AMC thriller The Killing, also based in B.C.’s Lower Mainland.

Continuum, developed for Canada’s Showcase specialty channel, has been renewed for a third season; the second season recently debuted on the U.S. Syfy channel. The Killing, meanwhile, is one of several high-profile, quality dramas on the upstart cable channel AMC, alongside Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and the filmed-in-Calgary anti-western Hell on Wheels.

“We are doing some great work in this country,” Dillon said. “It’s just great stuff. I like to look at it; I like to watch it. It’s been an exceptional period of time in television, for me personally and for these shows. And it has been for a while.”

Dillon knew about Continuum, having just finished five seasons of Flashpoint.

“I watched it, but I didn’t think I would ever be on it. I just hadn’t thought about it. I was back in Vancouver shooting The Killing and all of a sudden Simon Barry reached out. He’s a pretty smart guy, and something about this character he’d written just jumped out.”

As an actor, Dillon has the ability to play complex, deeply drawn characters with a disarming honesty and simplicity. His characters tend to be brooding and intense, whether in an action-driven potboiler like Flashpoint or a more personal, darkly disturbing thriller like Durham County.

In Continuum, Dillon plays a mysterious, mercurial corporate executive with a dark past. In The Killing, he plays a prison guard who knows more than he lets on. Both roles are open-ended. Both productions are shrouded in on-set secrecy, in part to prevent spoilers. All Dillon will say about his respective characters’ futures, beyond the episodes that have already aired, is that nothing is certain and anything’s possible.

“It’s just been a joy creatively. I’m still working; in fact, I go back to The Killing later this morning. These are the roles you wait for. Both Continuum and The Killing, both of them. Long ago, I was lucky enough to shoot Flashpoint and Durham County at the same time. It doesn’t happen often in an actor’s life that you get two great parts simultaneously.”

Dillon is no stranger to intensity, but he laughs easily in person. It’s a wry, sardonic laugh, the laugh of someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

“I’m very, very lucky to be a working actor, but I’ve also been careful. I don’t just take anything. Durham County came to me. You have to look at the quality of work you do, and Durham set the standard. I wait for things that keep me really interested.”

Dillon, a native of Kingston, Ont., had prominent roles in Toronto filmmaker Bruce McDonald’s Dance Me Outside and Hard Core Logo, and played opposite Vera Farmiga — a Television Critics Association Award nominee and likely Emmy contender for the filmed-in-Vancouver Bates Motel — in the Sundance Film Festival selection Down to the Bone.

Acting is a passion, but music runs in his blood.

“I have a day job,” he said. “Or a night job, I suppose. I’m that kind of actor. It’s because I was a musician, and still am. I go and play in my band, and I think that helps me. I have a repertoire of songs that I’m proud of, that I’ve written for my own band. When I do a cover, something that somebody else has written, I think about it very carefully before I sing that song. I have to really get behind it and understand it and like it. And that’s how I pick roles. I don’t want to play just anything. Life’s too short. It’s got to be great. And with The Killing — well, that speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I was in L.A. at the time, reading scripts, and nothing interested me but that. That was the only thing I had my sights set on. (The Killing creator) Veena Sud is just a fantastic writer and collaborator. She talked to me about the role, and I was in. It happened fast.

The Headstones reunited in 2011, after a sabbatical lasting several years in which Dillon formed and fronted the indie band Hugh Dillon Redemption Choir. Dillon recorded a solo album, Works Well With Others, a title which aptly sums up his professional crossroads. Music and acting share more in common than one might suppose.

“As I’ve learned the craft and technique of acting, just from some of the technical aspects, I’ve learned to see the connections. ‘Oh, I know how to do that.’ It’s because there are a lot of auditory cues. As a musician, you know when to come in — the snare drums, certain guitar notes. Your senses are super-heightened. I find sometimes that if I just relax, and it’s a great cast and great writing, it’s like a symphony. You know? Every little nuance in every little part, when people are on their game, just comes alive.

“Rachel Nichols, for example. That girl is so on her game that it makes acting … it takes it to another level. The writing is at another level, too; everything is so fine tuned on Continuum. It’s like being in a (music) studio. Everything is set up, and so you’re ultra-focused. I’m lucky that I have this other ghost life as a musician, because it does help me in my work as an actor.”

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